April Fool’s Days of the past were all about classic pranks, like gluing a quarter to the ground on a busy street corner.
But April Fool’s Day seems to have become less about physical gags and more about Internet gags. It can be pretty easy to pull off a prank online — especially since so many of us spend about every waking moment in front of a computer. Plus, pulling a prank online means you could get a ton of people at once to fall for your trick. For example, tweeting something like, “CRAZY video of me meeting Kanye West last night!” with a link to this video. Hilarious, I know. Feel free to use that one next year.
So what about company websites that take today to let loose and show everybody their wacky, fun side? Maybe you read about Google’s CADIE today, or maybe you excitedly clicked on the ad for the $99 pink leather Eames lounger in today’s Apartment Therapy email.
There’s also the extremely well-done (and daring!) Whole Foods homepage, which features a prominent ad for Organic Air that costs $6.99 for .02 oz (get it?), along with a bunch of recipes for dishes like Deep-Fried Pork Eclairs, Arugula Compost Surprise and… Toast. Mmmm.
The question is, if you’ve seen something April Foolsy today on a business’ website, how’d you find it? I’m willing to bet one or more of these things happened:
- You saw the link on your Twitter feed
- You saw the link on your Facebook feed
- Someone IMed/G-chatted it to you
- You saw the link on one of your favorite blogs (this one, obviously)
- A co-worker mentioned it during a lighthearted conversation at the watercooler
Next question: Did you tell someone about what you saw? Of course you did. That’s exactly what they wanted you to do. The April Fool’s Day joke was all about social media marketing, and by it getting passed from person to person via Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc., it was successful.
What’s more is that successful viral marketing like this means lots of inbound links to your website. That’s excellent for search engine optimization.
Maybe we won’t see as many classic pranks on future April Fool’s Days, but let me drop a pretty intense analogy on you here: By pulling off a well-done joke on a company website like Google.com or WholeFoodsMarket.com, isn’t that just the modern-day version of gluing a quarter to the ground on a busy street corner? People who first notice that quarter will pause to look closer, some bending down to try to grab it, which causes passersby to look and see what all the fuss is about. No matter what, everyone walks away knowing that there is a quarter glued to the ground.
(Whoa.)